So you want to create more engaging imagery for your blog and social media platforms? Woohoo! You’ve come to the right place.

Engaging imagery is a great way to attract more visitors to your blog posts, drive engagement on social media, increase brand awareness and virality and establish yourself as an industry thought leader. And the best part is, it’s really not that hard to create highly-engaging imagery to accompany your brand messaging.

In this article, we dive into why it’s important to create engaging imagery for your blog and social media platforms and how you can do it too!

Why Is It Important To Have Engaging Imagery?

As we were writing this blog post, HubSpot published a great piece of content that included 37 statistics marketers should know about visual content marketing for 2016, including the fact that content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images. The stats are undeniable, and make a great case as to why it’s so important to have engaging imagery on your blog and social media platforms.

Engaging imagery has the potential to drive more traffic to your blog, generate high-quality leads, convert new visitors into returning visitors, grow your social media following and see your content being shared across the web. There are so many reasons why it's important, so next time you're selecting an image for your blog post, swap 'good enough' for perfect.

Here are our top tips for creating engaging imagery:

Use High-Quality Imagery

To start with, you must always use high-quality imagery if you want your audience (and potential future audience) to notice your content and brand messaging. If you produce your own images, make sure they are taken on a DSLR camera, and ensure you understand the basics of composition, the rule of thirds and lighting. If you don’t have the time or resources required to take your own images, there are a bunch of both free and paid stock image sites that are filled with great imagery. Check out Shutterstock, Unsplash, Dollar Photo Club and Death To The Stock Photo to get you started.

Add Text And Graphics

Combining a layer of text on your images is great for engagement because it immediately commands attention and has potential to convey an important message that might have otherwise been missed in the flood of content, especially on social media platforms. The text layer could be an inspirational quote, industry tip, title or a call to action. Experiment with different fonts, colours, styles, formatting and borders in Photoshop or Canva.

Create A Style Guide For Your Brand Imagery

While on the topic of adding text and graphics to your imagery, it’s important to keep a style guide so all of your imagery is on brand across multiple platforms. An easy way to do this is to create a document with the fonts, text size and colours that your team should use for all of your visual content marketing assets. You should also include examples from each platform as reference.

Ensure Imagery Is Relevant To The Accompanying Text/Message

Perhaps the most important thing about engaging imagery is ensuring that it is relevant to the accompanying text and/or brand message that you want to convey. There’s no point in promoting your blog post on “Social Media Tips” alongside an image of a beautiful beach. Images are processed 600,000 times faster than text, so keep your images relevant to your topic so potential visitors know exactly what to expect as soon as they see your content pop up on their browser or newsfeed.

Give An Infographic A Crack

Once you think you’ve mastered the art of engaging imagery, perhaps it’s time to give an infographic a crack. Infographics compress a lot of information into a single piece of content, often combining text and images to visually interpret a topic. While infographics are great for user engagement, they also have great potential for virality as they are three times more likely to be shared on social media than any other type of content.

Do you have any tips on creating engaging imagery for your blog and social media platforms? We'd love to hear your thoughts, so leave a comment below!